


The Second Hand Unwinds

by deandratb



Category: The West Wing
Genre: Alternate Universe - Time Travel, F/M, references Helen and Matt Santos
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-28
Updated: 2018-09-28
Packaged: 2019-07-18 15:30:32
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 324
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16121420
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/deandratb/pseuds/deandratb
Summary: A terrorist attack on the First Lady threatens Donna's life, and Josh volunteers to travel through time in an attempt to save her.





	The Second Hand Unwinds

**Author's Note:**

  * For [greatestheights](https://archiveofourown.org/users/greatestheights/gifts).



> Fic prompt: **24 hours to live + time travel**

The world has developed the ability for time travel, which international bodies of law chose to strictly regulate. Every person is allowed one trip back to the past, and they have full control over when they utilize it and where it takes them.

Some choose to travel back to past eras and live their lives there, never returning to when they were born.

Others jump to the future, to see what the world will look like long after they’re gone.

Josh Lyman has always been too concerned with his present to go skipping through time, so he still has his trip waiting when he’s Chief of Staff to President Santos and receives the worst phone call of his life.

In the dark confines of the Situation Room, he listens to hardened men in uniforms and starched shirts explain that the First Lady’s trip to London was seen as an opportunity for a foreign terrorist group to make its voice heard.

A dozen staffers and Mrs. Santos herself have been mysteriously poisoned by some kind of slow-acting nerve agent, and are not expected to live past the day.

Twenty-four hours, the President is told by the best expert they could find on short notice. At maximum, they have one day to save Helen and her staff–a group that includes Josh’s fiancee, whose hospital bed he already sat beside once while he contemplated losing her.

He doesn’t hear the President’s immediate response; his brain is filled with a dull ringing sound and images of Donna. She’s not even his wife yet, he thinks. Why did it take them so long?

“I can fix this,” he tells the room. “If somebody can tell me–if we look up exactly what we’ll…”

Josh locks eyes with the man he talked into running, whose wife would be safer if they’d never met, and begs. He can’t sit by and wait again.

It’s Donna.

“Please. I can fix this.”

**Author's Note:**

> Title borrowed from "Time After Time" by Cyndi Lauper.


End file.
